Memorial Page for Miep Gies (née Hermine Santrouschitz)

Miep Gies (born Hermine Santruschitz on 15 February 1909 in Vienna; died 11 January 2010 in Hoorn) was an Austrian-Dutch helper of the Frank family and other Jewish people persecuted in Amsterdam. She supplied the people in the Secret Annex and, after their arrest, saved Anne Frank's diary.

From Vienna to Amsterdam

Gies was born in Vienna and came to the Netherlands after the First World War as a sick child sent away to recover. She grew up in a foster family and remained in Amsterdam. Hermine became Miep, a woman between Austrian origins and Dutch everyday life. In the 1930s she worked for Otto Frank at the Opekta company. That working relationship became a bond of trust that would become dangerous under German occupation.

Helper in the Secret Annex

When the Frank family went into hiding at the Prinsengracht on 6 July 1942, Miep Gies was one of the people who made daily life there possible. Together with Jan Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and others, she helped with food, news, books and everyday necessities. In the annex lived Otto, Edith, Margot and Anne Frank, as well as Hermann, Auguste and Peter van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer. The help was concrete, repeated and dangerous.

4 August 1944

On 4 August 1944 the hiding place was discovered. The eight people in hiding were arrested and later deported. Miep Gies remained behind. After the search, she gathered Anne Frank's diary notebooks and loose pages and kept them without reading them. When Otto Frank returned as the only one of the eight people from the annex and learned of his family's death, she gave him his daughter's writings.

The diary and memory

Without Gies's decision to protect the papers, Anne Frank's voice might have been lost. At the same time, Gies later repeatedly stressed that she did not see herself as exceptional. She spoke about responsibility, help and the possibility of not looking away in a concrete situation. After the diary's publication she remained close to Otto Frank and spoke against Holocaust denial and distortions of the history.

Recognition

In 1972 Yad Vashem recognised Miep and Jan Gies as Righteous Among the Nations. Further honours followed. For many readers of the diary, Miep Gies became a name for help under danger. It remains important that her story is not only about the saved diary, but also about the eight people who could not be saved and the many forms of quiet support during persecution.

Farewell

Miep Gies died in Hoorn on 11 January 2010. She was 100 years old. Her life remains connected with Anne Frank, but also with a simple and difficult question: what does a person do when neighbours, colleagues and friends are persecuted?